Donald L Smith

[mlurye]

Are you folks thinking that the NST output was center tapped?

Duane

Duane,
Yes it is center tapped.

[amigo]

So the GDT (surge arrestor) is leading off back to the center tap of the NST, which is incidently connected to the ground?

Back to the GDTs, I have found an interesting statement in a patent (US 5,617,284; page 7, 2nd column, line 29 on) that says:

Furthermore, another commonly used component is the gas discharge tube (GDT). Such a device operates very slowing and ignores fast rise time transients. It also has the disturbing characterstic of remaining shorted until all current has been removed. Thus, it typically turns a transient surge into a total loss of power and a tripped circuit breaker.

Poder that for a bit...

On the same note, after reading some datasheets on them, I am not sure if GDT would make good spark gaps as they would not last long under the spark gap conditions that exist. But, I will try it anyway...

I bought 12x350V spark arrestors and will hook them in series. They are DC devices so a I'll have to add a HV diode to the mix as well.

[h2ocommuter]

Link to Eric Dollare video of Longitudinal wave production

QUOTE=dragon;79625]Does anyone know what book these diagrams came from? Does anyone have the formula's associated with these diagrams?

Thanks in advance for any help in solving this...[/QUOTE]

First one is normal ringdown,second is normal resonance.
The last one is normal longitudinal wave production - it's now called exponential feedback resonance and it's carefully messed up in scientific papers to not let people figure out ...

If you do not have it, I'll put it here for everyone.
Tesla transverse and longitudinal electric waves[

If anyone can answer Dragons question I am sure we all could thank you.
The question was this.
Dragon stated,"I was looking for a more specific answer to the exponential feedback, specifically the formula's shown on that page, that can't be read, below each of the examples. I'm still searching for the book or any information leading to those specific formula's."....

I am with you Dragon this sounds to me like one of the major secrets needed.
It looks to me like a way to make somthing great out of somthing small.

h2ocommuter

[dragon]

QUOTE=dragon;79625]Does anyone know what book these diagrams came from? Does anyone have the formula's associated with these diagrams?

Thanks in advance for any help in solving this...

If you do not have it, I'll put it here for everyone.
Tesla transverse and longitudinal electric waves[

If anyone can answer Dragons question I am sure we all could thank you.
The question was this.
Dragon stated,"I was looking for a more specific answer to the exponential feedback, specifically the formula's shown on that page, that can't be read, below each of the examples. I'm still searching for the book or any information leading to those specific formula's."....

I am with you Dragon this sounds to me like one of the major secrets needed.
It looks to me like a way to make somthing great out of somthing small.

h2ocommuter[/QUOTE]

Actually, thanks to armagdn03 here on the board ,set me on the right path for discovery. He explained it as a Parametric oscillator, by putting in a little energy each time the amplitude of oscillations grow - similar to that of a child on a swing.

The main reason it caught my attention in Don's video is I had run into that from experiments in the past although I didn't understand what I was seeing at the time.

Wiki explains it better than I can....
________
Vaporizers

[boguslaw]

YES
Parametric oscillator - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

with feddback output to input.

[h2ocommuter]

Parametric oscillator

Allright, Wow, right on the button.
I have two quiries I could use help with here...
I don't know if this is what I need to solve the charging cap thing I have going on. I cannot seem to be able to charge them. what I am getting is the sparks going all the way through the caps. The energy does not accumulate inside the cap.

I am running the L-2 through the spark gap, then to the caps and LED's. then ground.

The second problem is understanding my Isolation transformer.
There are no labels on the unit except what you can read in the pics. so I am not sure which side is in, or out.
Each side has continuity across the leads except for the Green ground wire at the bottom, it does not seem to be grounded to anything internally or externaly.

Could someone shed some light on this for me.
I hope nobody thinks this second question is infantile,

[baroutologos]

Thanks Dragon for this insight. I was completely unaware of the parametric oscillators. perhaps Don makes use of the concept?

I have seen devices based on this concept. One is in this forum http://www.energeticforum.com/renewa...html#post73799. Another is Hiddink's patent (same concept, plasma used as the second cap plate)

J.L Naudin has tried (unsucessfully ?) to produce Ou with parametric resonance.
....

Don Smith has stressed that the front caps are customed made. Is there any chance those little 100nF caps to be vari-caps instead?
In any case, have we any evidence that parametric resonance is ou?

Baroutologos

[dragon]

Thanks Dragon for this insight. I was completely unaware of the parametric oscillators. perhaps Don makes use of the concept?

I have seen devices based on this concept. One is in this forum http://www.energeticforum.com/renewa...html#post73799. Another is Hiddink's patent (same concept, plasma used as the second cap plate)

J.L Naudin has tried (unsucessfully ?) to produce Ou with parametric resonance.
....

Don Smith has stressed that the front caps are customed made. Is there any chance those little 100nF caps to be vari-caps instead?
In any case, have we any evidence that parametric resonance is ou?

Baroutologos

The thanks actually goes to Armagdn03, he's the one that guided me in the right direction to discovery. I found you could recreate the effect using diodes and/or LED's in a tank circuit. Just like an LCR but replace the "R" with diodes pointing toward each other. In the middle of the diodes send a signal in, when it's in resonance there will be 2 distinctive peaks of 2 frequencies. The diodes will act similar to a varactor because of the time it takes to recover.

Don's diode set up is most likely creating a similar effect. It would appear to me the cap(s) is simply to set the resonance of L1 matched to the NST.

I ran into this the other day while poking around on the web, http://www.hvlabs.hu/zpe/Gruz/kapanadze.jpg , It appears to be a don smith device modified to operate a Tesla hairpin output of sorts. I thought it was interesting in it's simplicity... A translation would be nice for the details but most can be visually interpreted.

I found it quite interesting playing with the parametric oscillator, but it would appear that even with the build up and ring down the average energy put into it would be equal to that out of it. The attachement shows one version of it.
________

[dragon]

Allright, Wow, right on the button.
I have two quiries I could use help with here...
I don't know if this is what I need to solve the charging cap thing I have going on. I cannot seem to be able to charge them. what I am getting is the sparks going all the way through the caps. The energy does not accumulate inside the cap.

I am running the L-2 through the spark gap, then to the caps and LED's. then ground.

The second problem is understanding my Isolation transformer.
There are no labels on the unit except what you can read in the pics. so I am not sure which side is in, or out.
Each side has continuity across the leads except for the Green ground wire at the bottom, it does not seem to be grounded to anything internally or externaly.

Could someone shed some light on this for me.
I hope nobody thinks this second question is infantile,

Check out the link in my last post to give you a better idea of the cap placement. In an AC configuration the caps are constantly changing polarity. Sort of an "on demand" use. In a DC configuration the caps will store energy similar to a battery which can be used at will.

You sort of lost me on the transformer idea, It looks like the input has a center tap ( or output which ever it is ), and the other side looks like it could be used as various voltages. I'm not sure, you'd need to poke around a bit with a meter to find the variables between different points...
________

[baroutologos]

But the way, i checked the caps from the photos of Don's smith device. They are really Cornel Dubillier of the CMR series, although the serie stops at CMR08 now and it is very small capacitance. http://www.cde.com/catalogs/CMR.pdf

Indeed it could be easily customed made for Don's needs. By the way, the caps are plain caps of high reliability/qaulity MICA kind. They are quite expensive also. (another category 5kv 20nf MIKA kind of Cornel Dubilier sells as 400 USD)

For some reasons MICA caps are the way to go. They offer high pulse rate as Mr Mckay has find out. MICA and vaccum caps are the best for the job. Apart from pulse operation they offer exceptional Q values.

Anyway, no varicaps involved and the diodes there are of the VARO type at the slow frequency of NST 30KHz IMO cannot play a dramatic role in parametric oscillation except that of rectifying the current.
...
Again the topology of the primary circuit does not make sense to me, assuming the NST has not caps inside that will discharge via the cap arrestor to the primary parallel LC circuit.

Last but not least, using a simple Tesla Coil calculator, and making rough estimates, the typical LC resonance of the primary circuit is about 300 Khz (a harmonic perhaps of the NST?)

Baroutologos

[boguslaw]

I think you are on the right path.Could someone draw a plot of parametric oscillator output with synchronized in phase square wave driving FET on twice the resonant frequency of parametric oscillator ?
You might see something interesting there...
That was something I found 3 years ago but I missed that point...

[baroutologos]

Parametric oscillation or not, below i present my understanding of the (non-functional?) table device of Don Smith.

It seems that pure, high Q resonance is employed in his primary (parallel LC) tank circuit. Note that he has isolated FULLY the NST when not pusing the circuit. One end by the diodes and the other via the voltage arrestor.

This was (the peculiar old 2 spark-gaps arrangement) we have no electricity trasmition back to NST via one wire (well known fact anymore at high frequencies).

Voltage input can be regulated 0-9 KV say. this is set up so as to capture only the possitive cycle. Again this cycle seems to be x10 times longer that the LC circuit, in case the PVC has not any ferrite core (as Don has shown in other setups) thus lowering frequency.

The NST theoretically should pulse only during the appropriate phase of the cycle (thus helping the LC to resonate and gradually increasing oscillation's amplitude (amperage) thanks to ultra high Q and to a point of course.
That appropriate synergetic phase is defined by the spark-gap breakdown voltage and main C element's polarity and voltage level (at that instance).

(Note in what i am suggesting cannot be parametric oscilaltion. At some short point at best resonance is maintained as undamped waves)
...

Regarding the output circuit, i cannot grasp what DOn says. It seems a plain collector via air tramsformer action to me at this moment. In any case the frequencies involved and the capacities etc make no sense at calculating wavelengths since they go far beyond the lengths of the table top device.

Considering the ground usage, i have thoroughly conviced myself via experimenting that at high frequencies, the ground has beneficial attributes (do not knwo why yet) regarding efficiency of output.

@Dragon,

You are the most experienced here in practical terms with resonance regarding efficiency on potential OU behaviour.
It seems that you can enstablish a HUGE resonance of high Q only to exploit a tiny part of it.
E.g. in a 50 Hz circuit, you could have 300 volts in the caps and 10 amps circulating (a virtual 3Kw) still to be able to "extract" via low resistance loads some, say, 100-200 watts at an expence of less watts for maintaining the large resonator from being rang down.

Is that the case? Plain resonance? Could Don Smith devices could just be that what he says? A plain air core high frequency resonator and nothing else?

Thanks
Baroutologos

[dragon]

Odd feedback

Parametric oscillation or not, below i present my understanding of the (non-functional?) table device of Don Smith.

It seems that pure, high Q resonance is employed in his primary (parallel LC) tank circuit. Note that he has isolated FULLY the NST when not pusing the circuit. One end by the diodes and the other via the voltage arrestor.

This was (the peculiar old 2 spark-gaps arrangement) we have no electricity trasmition back to NST via one wire (well known fact anymore at high frequencies).

Voltage input can be regulated 0-9 KV say. this is set up so as to capture only the possitive cycle. Again this cycle seems to be x10 times longer that the LC circuit, in case the PVC has not any ferrite core (as Don has shown in other setups) thus lowering frequency.

The NST theoretically should pulse only during the appropriate phase of the cycle (thus helping the LC to resonate and gradually increasing oscillation's amplitude (amperage) thanks to ultra high Q and to a point of course.
That appropriate synergetic phase is defined by the spark-gap breakdown voltage and main C element's polarity and voltage level (at that instance).

(Note in what i am suggesting cannot be parametric oscilaltion. At some short point at best resonance is maintained as undamped waves)
...

Regarding the output circuit, i cannot grasp what DOn says. It seems a plain collector via air tramsformer action to me at this moment. In any case the frequencies involved and the capacities etc make no sense at calculating wavelengths since they go far beyond the lengths of the table top device.

Considering the ground usage, i have thoroughly conviced myself via experimenting that at high frequencies, the ground has beneficial attributes (do not knwo why yet) regarding efficiency of output.

@Dragon,

You are the most experienced here in practical terms with resonance regarding efficiency on potential OU behaviour.
It seems that you can enstablish a HUGE resonance of high Q only to exploit a tiny part of it.
E.g. in a 50 Hz circuit, you could have 300 volts in the caps and 10 amps circulating (a virtual 3Kw) still to be able to "extract" via low resistance loads some, say, 100-200 watts at an expence of less watts for maintaining the large resonator from being rang down.

Is that the case? Plain resonance? Could Don Smith devices could just be that what he says? A plain air core high frequency resonator and nothing else?

Thanks
Baroutologos

I appreciate the vote of confidence, I'm still learning like everyone else here. The set up I posted some time back - is a basic input section of dons device - identical to your drawing ( without the coils ). My NST is a 2 wire version - 12 volt input. 2500 volt output. (Ventex 4015-12).

I noticed after pulling the input power from the unit there was a continuous low grade spark across the gap and the unit continued to operate. Below is a screen shot of the unpowered oscillator. There are 2 levels of oscillation, the smaller group is at 333 khz and the spikes are at about 1:10 ratio or about 33khz. The spikes will continue for about 10 hours but the frequency of the spikes will degrade continuously. The smaller oscillations never change and as far as I can tell they don't quit. This has to be something from the ground connection. As long as the spikes continue it will energize a neon bulb, not bright but very noticable. Basically a visual indication that the circuit is indeed energetic.

The spark gap is made of Tungsten/thorium rods, before I was using basic steel which would corrode over a period. I thought a better grade of metal would extend the "spike" time but it didn't seem to change. I actually had quite a difficult time getting the spark gap set to duplicate the same results with the Tungsten rods.

Because of the arrangement I realized I had to consider the spark gap as a very low capacitance in its operation. As it continues you can't visually see a spark but it might transfere electrons similar to an air capacitor. The diode junction time most likely plays a part on it as well but to what degree I'm not sure.

You cannot remove energy from the system but I believe it might be possible to utilize it in a way that wouldn't disturb it's natural operation, unfortunately so far everything I've tried has failed. It's quite interesting just in the sense it will oscillate for so long without power... I think there is more to it than I understand.
________

[amigo]

Tonight I though to try something out as there seems to be much confusion about the primary section of the circuit.

A simple experiment, a center tapped transformer 110V 60Hz to 2x13VAC, and two 1N4005 diodes. Since I don't have a real ground, I used a water pipe connection.

Per DS's circuit, imagine the transformer being the NST, center tap is our balanced mid-point grounding, which is connected to the ground (water pipe).

Each end of the secondary goes to its own diode, and the two diodes are connected on the other end. There is no capacitor or the L1 coil as we are not emulating parallel LC tank here - not important.

Also, there is no GDT in my test, as the voltages are insignificant. Even if we were running this in the original circuit full blast, I do not believe that GDT acts as a spark gap but only as a surge arrestor, as it is designed to do.

You will need a scope for this test as it's much clearer what's happening. Scope lead is connected to the diodes while the ground is obviously going to the ground connection.

As baroutologos suspected, this diode configuration will pickup up only positive parts of the cycle and combining them you end up with 13VAC at 120Hz, or 12VDC, depending what you choose to read on the scope (I used a Fluke ScopeMeter 124 for this test).

If this was a power supply unit, one would stick a big ass electrolytic capacitor between the joined diodes end and the ground to straighten that wave and get pure DC, but that's not what we are doing here, are we?

Going back to DS circuit, let's assume he's using a 12kV NST, balanced mid-point grounding one, so 2x6kV. Considering the diode configuration it's really giving him 6kV at 2x the NST pulsing rate, if co-relation to my experiment stands, no?

Thus he only needs to deal with 6kV at the output. Fine. We can understand now why the 4kV capacitors in the LC tank circuit. But wait.

If he's half-a-good engineer as they say he is, then he would choose capacitors that are rated at 2x the circuit voltage, or at least 1.5x. So his voltages can not exceed 3kV or if he wants to play on the edge, 4kV, but I doubt it, or he'd burn his caps.

Therefore when he says that the circuit works better at lower voltages, I believe it's because the circuit will burn the components if he pushes that dimmer higher. Incidentally that's one of the reasons there is a dimmer to begin with.

Now, let's go back to the GDT in the circuit. I hope you read my previous post above and that quote I included. If you read up on GDTs they are mostly DC devices, used in TeleCom and similar fields for circuit protection. They are not meant to be constantly on, as a real spark gap would need to.

In DS's circuit, GDT serves exactly the purpose it is built to do - surge arrestor. I would assume that the one he used is probably 2kV or perhaps 3kV as I would not put a 4kV one at the risk of burning my capacitors in the LC tank. So, I believe its purpose is to protect the rest of the circuit and as DS himself says, to limit the output voltage to acceptable levels.

Thus the practicality of GDT as a spark gap gets thrown out, especially if the quote I posted is true, regarding GDT remaining shorted until all the current is removed. And, just to remind you, primary is a parallel LC tank so we are dealing with currents not voltages.

I hope I made sense and invite your comments about the above statements.

[deggers]

UL 2161 Neon Transformers

It seems as though a lot of the newer NSTs have ground fault protection. Perhaps this could be causing a sinifigant loss of output power in Don's circuits. See this PDF from Venetx.
http://www.ventextech.com/pdf/Neon_Appl_Guide.pdf

Also, doing a Google patent search on Bertonee will give you some schematics of their older units. Check some of the Citations and "Referenced by" also if interested.

Nothing ground breaking (except for Robert E. Iannini's "Love Meter" perhaps)
Just some info for those interested.

I'm trying to figure out if a NST is the way to go, or else I'm going to make/buy something better suited for Don's device. (Tabletop-sliding coil design)

I've done enough reading for a while. Time to make something go bang!

Duane